Garages of the Valley

The composer provided the following note about Garages of the Valley for Chamber Orchestra:

Paradoxically, much of what we now think of as "the Digital Age" was dreamed up in the most low-tech of spaces. The garages that dot the landscape of Silicon Valley housed the visionaries behind Apple, Hewlett Packard, Intel, and Google.

My imagined music of these tech workshops begins hyper-kinetically yet sporadically, filled with false starts. It soon flashes into a quicksilver world of out exotic textures and tunings that is informed by the music of the French composer Gerard Grisey, whose imaginative orchestrations sound electronic but are completely unplugged. The exhilarating finale reflects the infectious optimism of the great inventors of our time, who from their dark garages conjured new worlds within the bright Valley.

The piece is dedicated to Maestro Edo de Waart, who lived just north of the Valley when some of its garages were just starting to burst with energy.